February 3, 2023

Photo credit: New School Foods
By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

Plant-based seafood producer New School Foods has emerged from stealth to publicly present its proprietary, scalable technologies for plant-based meat production, able to produce whole-cut fish alternatives that are on-par with animal-based counterparts. 

Concurrently, the startup announced it has closed on $12 million in Seed funding from high-profile investors, Lever VC, Blue Horizon, Hatch, Good Startup, Alwyn Capital, and Joyance Partners. This funding was also accompanied by grants from multiple agencies including Protein Industry Canada. 

The aspect of whole-cut production has presented a complex challenge for the alternative meat industry – one involving texture, connective tissue, muscle fibers, and other macrostructures in animal proteins. 

And as whole-cuts account for the majority of meat sales in North America, these challenges are definitely worth resolving, despite their complexity. 

The established methods of alternative meat production have typically involved high-moisture extrusion – a process that uses high temperatures to pre-cook the food which denatures the proteins. However, New School Foods is taking a different approach. 

Founded in Toronto, Canada, in 2020, New School uses a series of cold-based processes that produces a “raw” product that transitions to being cooked – creating an entire process that more closely resembles the cooking experience of animal meat. 

“The next frontier of meat alternatives is whole cuts, and from day one we understood that New School Foods needed to solve two heavily connected issues: the quality of the meat alternatives in-market, and the limited toolkit our industry uses to produce them,” said Chris Bryson, CEO and founder, New School Foods. 

“What’s generally available for consumers now are rubbery, ground, pre-cooked products that will not convince the average customer to change their lifelong habits.”

For three years, Bryson invested significantly in R&D projects in partnership with some of the leading food science universities in the world, identifying and building a scalable platform that delivers multiple firsts for the alternative meat industry. 

~ Muscle fibers made from plants that replicate the diameter, length, strength, and structure of fish fibers to deliver the same texture and mouthfeel.

~ Whole cut scaffolding that combines directionally aligned muscle fibers with plant-based connective tissue, fats, colors, and flavors.

~ A raw-to-cooked process producing a “raw” product that transforms like fish upon cooking.

~ And a scalable design that uses off-the-shelf equipment from adjacent industries, providing an outsized ability to scale globally. 

Now, with this $12 million in Seed capital, New School Foods stated that it intends to continue focusing on R&D, to expand its team of food scientists, scale up its scaffolding technology, and to build out a research and production facility. 

The company also announced the launch of a chef-only pilot program, (interested chefs can apply at the startup’s website – newschoolfoods.co) with expectations that they will launch their salmon alternative in multiple restaurants across North America this year. 

Nick Cooney, General Partner at Lever Ventures, commented, “We invested in New School Foods because they recognized that the existing production technologies in the plant-based meat industry are insufficient for creating a whole-cut product that consumers genuinely want to eat,”

“Their technology is unlike anything else we’ve seen in the industry in terms of truly mimicking the texture, mouthfeel, and experience of cooking and eating whole cuts of meat.”

~ Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor in chief with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, as well as HighQuest Group’s Unconventional Ag. She can be reached at lkiernan-stone@globalaginvesting.com.

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